World Record

By Brett Leigh Dicks

It’s funny how stunts tend to take on a life of their own. When
KTYD’s Morning Show deejay Matt McAllister decided to break the
Guinness world record for wearing the most T-shirts at one time as
a charity fundraiser for Computers for Families little did he know
how the feat would resound. Under the watchful eye of a couple of
paramedics, McAllister donned 155 shirts and beat the previous
record by 34.

The entire proceeding was recorded, with successive photographs
documenting each and every T-shirt. “We made a time-lapse video out
of the photos and put it up on YouTube.com,” explained McAllister.
“All of a sudden it just took off and we now have 1.7 millions
hits. We then got offers from Good Morning America and The Today
Show and the like, all wanting interviews and also wanting me to
put the shirts on. But I didn’t want to put all those shirts on
again more than once, so my producer called the Letterman show and
told them about the offers and said that if we did anything on TV
we want to do it on his show because we’re big fans.”

Last week, McAllister — along with Morning Show cohorts Hayseed
and Julie Ramos — headed to New York for an appearance on The Late
Show to do it all over again. Now his record-breaking performance
is being talked about the world over: From Ireland to New Zealand,
shirt-wearing tomfoolery is now firmly entrenched in Santa
Barbara’s international identity.

“It wasn’t just me who went on Letterman,” explained McAllister,
who the week before was having major troubles with station
management regarding the format of his show. “I went there
representing the radio station and all of my listeners and the city
as a whole. Santa Barbara is connected to this thing whether it
likes it or not! And people seem proud that Santa Barbara is
getting some recognition other than Hollywood celebrities or who’s
buying a house and how much it costs to live here. It’s nice for
the country to know we too can do something stupid and that we have
a good sense of humor and are not taking ourselves too
seriously.”